I am
currently editing my grandfather's diaries based on his youth in
Vishigrod and his experiences as a Jewish
officer in Czar's army during the Russo-Japanese War. His stories were written
in Yiddish in 28 notebooks that he had hoped to publish, but he died the very
day that he and my mother were to begin working on them.

After my
grandfather's death, it took many years to translate the notebooks and extract
his stories as they had been written as a stream-of-consciousness in 1904 and
1931. “The Samurai of Vishigrod”, which my parents published in 1976, is
based on the first 16 notebooks. While I was originally going to see to it that
the stories from the remaining 12 diaries were published, I realized that, in
order to have the deserved impact, the stories needed to be read in the context
of what came before them, so I have taken it upon myself to re-edit the first
volume and, combined with what would have been the second volume, create a
cohesive narrative about life for an orthodox Jew in Russian-occupied Poland in
the late 19th century. His story continues through his adventures in Warsaw, St.
Petersburg, Siberia and Manchuria, and Harbin, China.

Attached
is a chapter from "The Samurai of Vishigrod," which bears the same name. When
Josh told me that you maintained a website for people whose roots were inVishigrod, it
was this chapter that I thought of sending you because it offers a good flavor
of what it was like to live in Vishigrod in the 1880s-1890s. There are several
other tales set in and near this town that I'm sure your readers will recognize,
and which may be of interest to you at a later date.

Shortly I
expect to begin blogging about the process of bringing these stories to
publication (which may include other excerpts from the text), and at that time
would greatly appreciate it if you would link it to your website; I would also
like to do the same for you. In the meantime, I will be interested in hearing
about any reactions to this first story that you receive from your readers.

The Samurai of Vishogrod and the Very Small
Pogrom

One of the legendary heroes of my
childhood was Yonah the messenger. At that time, he was already in his sixties,
yet a man of such vigor still that I can hardly begin to picture what he must
have been like in his youth.

Being a hero, at least in our corner of the world, was not exactly a full-time
job nor, even on a part-time basis, a profession on which a man could feed his
family. And so, in his everyday existence, Yonah was simply a part of our
"postal ser­vice," which, in its own way, was as curious a feature of life in
Vishogrod as the man himself.

For ordinary mail we had an ordinary letter carrier, a man named Yudel, who
could neither read nor write, and therefore cruel tongues, quite overlooking his
more serious infirmities, called him "Blind Yudel." But we also had two special
messengers avail­able for the delivery of telegrams, money, or urgent
communica­tions which, you will be surprised to know, often happened more than
once a year.

Of course, even the regular mailman came so rarely that one day, when my brother
Avrohom and I were locked in alone in the house and heard a sharp knock on the
door, we crawled under the covers in terror and, unaccustomed to the sudden
warmth, fell asleep.

The next day, in case evil spirits should come knocking again, our mother stayed
home with us, keeping warm by sitting huddled over a bucket of live coals
between her feet and looking, may she forgive me, less like a mother than like a
pile of rags.

Sure enough, in the midst of howling winds, there was that knocking again, only
embellished this time with a dry, ghostly cough.

My mother shrank with fear, and my brother and I covered our heads with the
blanket. Only Itteleh, the butcher's wife, who was visiting with us, held on to
her wits. She picked up a cleaver, went to the door, and screamed, "Demon!
Unclean Spirit! Back to your resting place!" (As you can see, in Vishogrod we
knew how to deal with the Powers of Darkness.)

As it turned out, the letter he'd been trying to deliver to us for the past week
was actually for someone else. But no one, of course, held that against him—an
illiterate Jew, after all, being as uncommon and as deserving of pity as any
other kind of cripple.

Yudel got no salary from the government. Recipients paid him two kopeks for a
postcard and three for a sealed letter, and sometimes even four, if it came all
the way from Warsaw. A letter from Warsaw normally took several weeks, during
which time Ignatz, the Pole who drove the postal wagon with its two dying
horses, plodded staunchly through oceans of mud and somehow crossed rivers
largely lacking in of such conveniences as bridges or ferries. Thus, who could
blame Ignatz if sometimes he decided to make a little stop for recuperation at a
wayside inn, empty a bottle or two, dally with one of his mistresses, and, as
often as not, return to Warsaw without delivering the mail because he'd
forgotten in which direction he was headed?

Anyway, when God helped and the mail finally did arrive, Reb Yudel would put on
his uniform, consisting of a shapeless cap with a green band, proudly pin his
father's medal (from the Russo-Turkish War) over his breast, and commence to
march (that is, marching with one foot and dragging the other) down the main
street with an air befitting a man who was, for the moment, not only an arm of
the government, but also entitled to the respect due the son of a decorated
soldier; for Vishogrod, like any other little Jewish town, not only had its
share of otherworldly Talmudists and starving merchants, but its heroes as
well. About one of whom, I will have more to say in a moment.

Now since Yudel, through no fault of his own, almost invari­ably misdelivered
the mail, some well-meaning people suggested that my father, who was at that
time without employment, and not only could read and write Yiddish and Hebrew
but also knew Polish, Russian, and a bit of German, should become the town's
letter carrier.

Others, however, quickly pointed out that the lob had not only been in Yudel's
family for generations, but why should he be penalized for the undeserved
misfortune of being illiterate? The question actually was academic, because my
father would never have violated the biblical command against trespassing on
another's territory for any amount of money. He was, in fact, far too proud a
man to have accepted such a menial position for pay; nor would my mother have
wanted him to. (When there was no hot food in the house for Shabbos, and we
seemed in imminent danger of having one of our neighbors share their meal with
us, my mother would leave a large pot of water boiling in the kitchen Friday
afternoon, so that no passer-by, God forbid, might suspect the Maratecks were
going hungry.)

But what was to be done? People did like to get their own mail, even though,
more often than not, it was bound to contain only more bad news. Didn't a letter
go through enough suffering and uncertainty before it reached town without also
being abandoned to the incompetence of Blind Yudel?

But leave it to Jews to find a solution. A clearinghouse was established in the
synagogue and, by common agreement, when­ever anyone received a letter addressed
to someone else, instead of returning it to the uncertain fate of Reb Yudel's
dubious mail pouch and perhaps hurting his feelings besides, he would bring it
with him to evening prayers and place it on the pulpit. Any time a few letters
accumulated, my father would mount the pulpit after the final kaddish and read
off the correct names. This satisfied all factions, although of course it
overlooked the fact that this brought my father not one kopek closer to making a
living.

But what about telegrams, packages, rabbinical documents, or letters with money
inside? For this responsible job we had, as I said, not merely one messenger
available, but two.

The lower-grade "special deliveries" were made by Moishka, a little man with a
scraggly, sulphurous beard and, between us, a man of middling intelligence, that
is, neither a great genius nor a small fool. (They tell that once he was sent
with an urgent letter from Vishogrod to Novydvar, an all-night journey, and he
came back with the letter undelivered because the man to whom it had been
addressed was still sleeping when he arrived.)

But the other messenger, the only one who was trusted with money or with parcels
of sufficient value to attract robbers, was Yonah, known even to our gentiles as
"Yonah the Iron Man." Yonah, although already blessed with enough grandsons to
make up a minyan in at least two synagogues, was, not to exaggerate, another
Samson. Perhaps not quite as strong or as violent, but, on the other hand, also
the last man in the world who would have let a Philistine wench lead him around
by the hair?

They used to tell how, one day, Eisenberg the lumber dealer sent Yonah to Warsaw
with an astronomical amount of money to deposit into the bank there. Yonah tied
on his two big bags of money with a rope and tucked his payess into his
cap (after all, though he surely wasn't ashamed of his earlocks, why go out of
your way to look for a fight with some ignorant peasant, when you were being
paid to save your energies for quite another sort of trouble?), and, carrying
the bag with his tallis and tefillin, two loaves of bread, and a
dozen onions, set off on foot, armed with nothing but a stout stick.

Anyway, while he was pacing along briskly through a dark forest in the middle of
the night (sleep, of course, being out of the question), refreshing himself with
a piece of bread and onion, and keeping himself company by reciting the Psalms
in a voice as pure as thunder, he was halted by an armed robber. What we
Ameri­cans would call a holdup man. Carrying an immense revolver that seemed to
be fairly bursting with large lead bullets eager to be discharged, he told Yonah
to hand over all the money he was carrying or else he would shoot him down on
the spot, absolutely without mercy, like a dog.

Fortunately for Yonah, the bandit was a Jew (for what other kind of bandit would
even talk about such a thing as ‘mercy?’), so that it was possible to discuss
the matter in a civilized way.

Yonah explained that he was certainly ready to hand over the money. After all,
it wasn't his own. But there was his reputation to consider. Knowing him as a
fearless and powerful man, his em­ployer surely would refuse to believe that
Yonah would have given up such a sum of money without at least some signs of a
struggle.

What better way to prove that he'd been overpowered by a man with a gun than to
be able to display an actual bullet hole in his coat? It was, after all, a small
enough favor to ask for the sake of preserving one's reputation as an honest
man.

The bandit, being, as I said, Jewish, understood Yonah's predicament perfectly
and sent a large, well-aimed bullet through Yonah's coattail, which was
accommodatingly open.

You know the outcome. Jewish bandits in Poland didn't have six-shooters. The
demonstration bullet had emptied the gun. At which point, Yonah felt it safe to
deal the foolish bandit a small tap—which left him lying unconscious with a
generously bleeding nose.

So Yonah continued on his way, loudly resuming his recital of Psalms where he'd
left off, while the poor bandit, once he recovered consciousness, yelled after
him in deep reproach that he never would have believed a God-fearing man capable
of playing such a low trick on a fellow Jew. (And, though I now suspect that the
whole story is pure legend, this was at least the sort of thing they told about
him. What I mean is, true or not, do they tell such stories about you?)

Of course, all this is merely to set the stage, as it were, for the story I
meant to tell.

In our neighboring town of Bazenova, a rumor had gone around that on the coming
market day "a little pogrom" was going to take place. I don't know how it was
where you came from, but in our part of Poland, all rumors had one
characteristic in common: the bad ones were never false.

Now by a "little pogrom" I take it that they meant it was to be essentially a
civilian undertaking, without cavalry support or firearms, or that sort of
thing. Still, for a stallkeeper, with only a basket of eggs standing between him
and total starvation, even an infinitesimal pogrom was a thing, given a choice,
one would prefer to do without. No such choice being available, a delegation was
dispatched hastily to our Rabbi with a plea for help. That is to say, a plea for
Yonah.

Now on market days, even in the best of times, the hordes of peasants let loose
in Bazenova were something of a hazard. And not only did the people of Bazenova
have no one fit to mention in the same breath with our Yonah (while we in
Vishogrod actu­ally were blessed with a number of other good Jewish ruffians as
well), but their entire police force consisted of two men, the younger of whom
would never see seventy again, while the other, when he had to go up one step to
enter a store for the policeman's customary reason the world over (that is, with
his hand open in front of him), a kindly passerby would have to seize his elbow
and give him a little boost. Upon the shoulders of these two ferocious guardians
of the law rested the protection of Bazeno­va's Jews against a mob of drunken,
bloodthirsty peasants.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that Bazenova's Jews never dreamt of
protesting this situation, as it is a well-known fact that the older and feebler
a policeman gets, the less energy he has left over for hitting Jews.

So our Rabbi ordered that, under Yonah's leadership, a dozen of our "men of
valor" were to drive out Tuesday morning and lend the benefit of their
experience to Bazenova's embattled Jews. (In later years, when my wanderings
took me to Japan, I found that this sort of arrangement used to be traditional
there, too, although the defenders they used, called samurai, got paid for
fighting. I never could understand why, since the Japanese villagers were not
Jews, anyone should want to attack them.)

So on Monday night, the eve of market day, Yonah and his men set out, with God's
help and the Rabbi's blessings, in two wagons drawn by teams of horses furnished
by our town's richest Jews. As people in those days were usually too poor to own
rifles or machine guns, their entire arsenal consisted of stones, clubs,
and fists.

If I go into such detail over an incident at which, as far as can remember, I
was not even present, it is perhaps to explain by, much as I loved my father,
the person I most aspired to resemble when I grew up was Yonah, our "Samurai of
Vishogrod."

The men stopped overnight at a very decent inn on the outskirts Bazenova, and on
Tuesday morning, Yonah and his band, after putting away a respectable breakfast
of roast duckling and plum brandy, betook themselves, glowing with good humor,
to the Mar­ket Square, looking to all the world like jolly merchants out for a
nice bargain on a horse or a bushel of potatoes.

The market was already crowded with peasants, and everyone - with the possible
exception of the policemen, could sense that something was in the wind.

Yonah sized up the situation in a moment. Like a good general, he divided up his
little army into four companies, so that they could never all be surrounded at
the same time, for the techniques of street fighting in those days were already
beginning to outgrow the primitive methods of an earlier age.

Yonah himself set up his command post in the attic of Shmuel the scribe. From
here he was able to survey the entire square and gauge the exact moment at which
an accumulation of "normal" incidents would flare up into a concerted, if still
reason­ably small, pogrom. As a strategist, he knew the importance of not
putting your cards on the table too early.

Here and there, little incidents had already begun to erupt. Some loaves of
bread snatched from a baker. A basket of eggs robbed from Sheindel the midwife.
In the widow Yetta's little store, some peasants broke the windows and emptied a
sack of flour. When she protested, they beat her and told her that today they
meant to finish off every Jew in town and take over their property, because the
priest had told them Sunday morning that everything the Jews owned had been
stolen from the peasants, anyway.

Thus far, as you can sec, everything was quite normal, and someone less shrewd
than Yonah might have suspected the whole thing had been a false alarm. But he
knew from experience that a Polish peasant, unlike, say, a Ukrainian, has to
work himself up to a real pogrom by gradual stages. And so, after listening
cold-bloodedly to the dispatches coming in all morning, it took a little while
before he decided finally that the time had come for his men to go back to the
wagons and, in a manner of speaking, arm themselves.

Favored by nearly all of them were clubs of plum-wood, hard as iron.

However, since it was close to lunchtime now, and there was no telling how soon
they would get to eat, they digressed long enough to take aboard another round
of schnapps. Following this, with the cry, "Jews, for kiddush ha-shemn!" Yonah
committed his little army.

By this time, the pogrom had erupted in earnest. Goods were being looted by the
armful, and even failure to protest didn't save stallkeepers, women and children
included, from being beaten right and left. The noise was fantastic and the
entire market boiled

with flailing arms and clubs, collapsing stands and flying things, from bloody
feathers to paving blocks.

It took Yonah and his four companies some time to fight their way into the eye
of the storm. By this time, the peasants had been gripped by the excitement of
the thing, and their leaders were no longer bent so much on plunder as on the
pure joy of bloodshed.

Yonah himself had entered the market barehanded. Up till now, in fact, he had
even retained his customary air of calm good humor. Until he saw one of his men
go down with a spurting head, struck from behind by a paving stone. At this, he
leaped up at an approaching wagon whose peasant driver had been running
cheerfully over a row of stalls. He seized the peasant by the throat and flung
him into the crowd. Then, with a voice like thunder, he identified himself as
Yonah the messenger from Vishogrod, and warned the peasants to clear out at
once.

Those who knew him or had heard of his reputation instantly took their legs on
their shoulders and fled, but the majority simply laughed at him.

Yonah, still determined to give them one more chance (since by our law, even the
owner of a rampaging ox is entitled to one warning), jumped down, tore the back
wheels off the wagon, and lifted up the axle. However, those peasants who had
remained were, by this time, far too flushed with vodka and thirst for blood to
be impressed even by this performance. And so he began laying about him with the
axle of the wagon. His little army, heart­ened by his example, contributed their
own modest share in his wake.

Within a few minutes, the Market Square was a wilderness.

Some of the peasants who were still on their feet escaped in such haste that
they left horses, wagons, and even livestock behind them.

By midafternoon, the Bazenova
"hospital," that is, the Russian doctor's barn, overflowed with casualties.
There were countless fractures, but no dead, as Jews, I may have mentioned
earlier, are children of mercy. The defenders, too, carried back their share of
wounds, both major and minor, but all agreed that the whole expedition had been
very worthwhile.

And who, by the way, do you
suppose turned out to have been one of the first casualties? It was the younger
of the two ancient gendarmes, who had stopped half a brick with the back of his
head while running away.

That was not quite the end of
it. A few weeks later, an investigating commission arrived from the office of
the provincial governor. Yonah, his fellow "samurais," and several dozen
peas­ants were placed under arrest, on some trumped-up charge like disturbing
the peace or "causing willful and malicious damage to cattle, property, and
subjects of the Czar."

But they were never brought to
trial. The peasants were far too frightened for their lives to testify against
Yonah. He, for his part, pressed no charges; he probably felt that they had
already been punished adequately, and besides, the only pogroms in which the
governor could be expected to take a meaningful interest were those which he had
incited, himself.

But for as long as I can
remember after that, not even a very small pogrom ever took place again in
Bazenova. The peasants must have passed on to their children and even their
children's children the wisdom of not starting up with such a barbaric people as
the Jews.